This post essentially serves as an addendum to last week’s piece on abandoned digital space, where I introduced an idea — or rather an image — but didn’t really give it the attention it deserves, given some of the things it suggests about our capacity for imagining the world without us and why exactly we find such images viscerally disturbing.
Recently, I started following a new podcast from Slate.com called Lexicon Valley. The half hour-long, weekly podcast by Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo covers a variety of topics but all of the episodes center around changes in language and the power of words. Their June 4th episode was devoted to Abraham Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address and I highly recommend giving it a listen. While Vuolo and Garfield conclude that the Gettysburg Address closely follows the structure of an ancient Greek funeral oration, they also note that the brevity of the address was both rhetorically deft and politically pragmatic. The address was reprinted verbatim on the front page of most major newspapers and was easily reproducible in every format imaginable– from pamphlets to marble plaques. Today, we can share huge amounts of information with little-to-no effort, yet the art of keeping it brief seems to hold sway. What are some of the unique properties of brevity that makes it so alluring and what can we expect to achieve with it? more...
As part of my research I spend a lot of time preparing and conducting science lessons with 8th graders. Today they got to learn how to make moss graffiti. After a quick botany lesson they were allowed to paint whatever they wanted onto a large canvas drop cloth. What surprised me the most was the students’ overwhelming desire to simply write their names. If they didn’t write their names, they usually wrote a short phrase. Out of about 80 students, there were only a handful of drawings. Almost every student decided to write text. Some of that text, strangely enough, took the form of emoticons. Why would anyone choose to draw an emoticon? more...
Last month in Part I (Distributed Agency and the Myth of Autonomy), I used the TtW2012 “Logging Off and Disconnection” panel as a starting point to consider whether it is possible to abstain completely from digital social technologies, and came to the conclusion that the answer is “no.” Rejecting digital social technologies can mean significant losses in social capital; depending on the expectations of the people closest to us, rejecting digital social technologies can mean seeming to reject our loved ones (or “liked ones”) as well. Even if we choose to take those risks, digital social technologies are non-optional systems; we can choose not to use them, but we cannot choose to live in a world where we are not affected by other people’s choices to use digital social technologies.
I used Facebook as an example to show that we are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not. Facebook (and other companies) collect what I call second-hand data, or data about people other those from whom the data is collected. This means that whether we leave digital traces is not a decision we can make autonomously, as our friends, acquaintances, and contacts also make these decisions for us. We cannot escape being connected to digital social technologies anymore than we can escape society itself.
This week, I examine two prevailing privacy discourses—one championed by journalists and bloggers, the other championed by digital technology companies—to show that, although our connections to digital social technology are out of our hands, we still conceptualize privacy as a matter of individual choice and control, as something individuals can ‘own’. Clinging to the myth of individual autonomy, however, leads us to think about privacy in ways that mask both structural inequality and larger issues of power. more...
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about how we not only manage our image (outgoing) but also curate our view (incoming). As a very brief summary, I argued, based upon data from my own ongoing social media study, that despite the potential for social media to expose us to a variety of perspectives and opinions (creating a public sphere, or at least a public space), we discriminately select which perspectives and opinions to let in, and which to exclude. In doing so, we curate reality. Though this manifests in a variety of ways, a prevalent manifestation is the management of one’s Facebook News Feed.
A new push for the (apparently long present) feature on Facebook, in which users are asked to “star” the Friends whose content they want to make more visible, further supports this trend. More importantly, however, it demonstrates the mutually influential relationship between physical architectures, normative social structures, and personal practices.
The physical architecture of a space (online or offline) simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, those who use it. For instance, the typical classroom is set up with an instructor who stands at a high desk in the front of a room, facing students, who sit in low desks, with their bodies and eyes oriented forwards and upwards towards the teacher. This both creates and reflects a particular power dynamic, and guides how participants in the interaction think about and act towards themselves and one another. Similarly, architectures of online spaces reflect and guide who we are and what we do in those spaces.
There is often the assumption that the information economy expects us to consume more and more, leading us to process more but concentrate less. Some have called this a “fear of missing out” (or FOMO), a “blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media.” However, most of these arguments about FOMO make the false assumption that the information economy wants and expects us to always process more. This isn’t true; we need to accept the reality that the information economy as well as our own preferences actually value, even need, missing out.
Many do feel in over their heads when scrolling social media streams. Especially those of us who make a hobby or career in the attention/information economy, always reading, sharing, commenting and writing; tweeting, blogging, retweeting and reblogging. Many of us do feel positioned directly in the path of a growing avalanche of information, scared of missing out and afraid of losing our ability to slow down, concentrate, connect and daydream, too distracted by that growing list of unread tweets. While it seemed fun and harmless (Tribble-like?) at first, have we found ourselves drowning in the information streams we signed up for and participate in? more...
The original video I posted was taken down. Alexander calls cricket a “gay game” 5 minutes in.
In an interview with Craig Ferguson last week, Jason Alexander called the game of Cricket “a gay game.” It was clear (and you can see for yourself in the video above, starting at the 9 minute mark) that Alexander was equating “gay” with “effeminate” and juxtaposing words like “gay” and “queer” with notions of masculinity and being “manly.” After the show aired, the tweets started pouring in. This tweet by @spaffrath was pretty trypical: more...
While tech-writers often act as if the Web is something out there away from society, we all know (and they do too) that technology is always embedded in social structures, power, domination and inequalities. And the words we choose to talk about tech, while seemingly innocuous, betray some pretty heavy political predispositions.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story looking at a “new digital divide” where “poorer” folks aren’t using the web in a “meaningful” way but instead are “wasting time” on social media. I was reminded of how Facebook users looked down on MySpace users a few years ago or the current racist rhetoric surrounding iPhone versus Android mobile phone users. Technology is often an excuse to reify the fallacy that those less privledged are an other, different, less capable and less human.
Whenever someone declares what Internet-use is “meaningful” versus a “waste” we must be critical: who is making the claim? who benefits from these too-commonly constructed hierarchies? And here, as usual, we are dealing with a hierarchical framework created by privileged folks for everyone else to placed within. more...
Last week, cell phone footage emerged on Youtube that purports to be taken by a Saudi Arabian woman in a mall, of her clash with the Saudi religious police. The woman is righteously indignant, insisting that they have no right to harass her, that it’s “none of [their] business if [she] wears nail polish”. She also tells them to “smile for the camera”, as she’s filming the entire thing and is sharing the footage.
The pattern of this particular encounter isn’t necessarily novel, and by Western standards a claim on the right to wear nail polish in public seems fairly mundane, but there is something worth noting about the specific dynamics inherent in sharing this kind of footage. Most obviously there’s the fact that in countries with repressive laws based on gender, wearing nail polish in public may indeed be an extremely subversive act, but that leaves aside the question of the cell phone footage itself, and what uploading it to Youtube does.
A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry on technological autonomy. It made the point that a nation’s commitment to advanced technologies can result in a situation where its economic well-being is directly counter to the physical or psychological well-being of its people. The point I’d like to make today is that the commitments of corporations to advanced technologies can become similarly antithetical.
The example in that previous post was Japan’s commitment to nuclear power. Here I’ll consider two examples involving specific consumer products: the international sale of sports utility vehicles and the international sale of snack foods.Both examples raise an important definitional question: Which is the driving force, technology or capitalism? It’s a hard question to answer because at a certain stage of development the two are so closely intertwined that it’s often impossible to separate them. On the one hand, the spread of global capitalism would clearly be impossible without mass production technologies. On the other hand, capitalism is clearly the economic model most responsible for the development and exploitation of mass production technologies.
The historian David F. Noble has argued that technology is “the racing heart of corporate capitalism,” implying that capitalism directs the enterprise while technology supplies the motive force. I think you could just as successfully argue that the opposite is true. The best solution is probably to say that the relationship between technology and capitalism is dialectical, or symbiotic. Sometimes technology stimulates capitalism, other times capitalism stimulates technology; in advanced technological/capitalist societies neither could exist without the other. From either perspective an expansion of influence becomes a priority that overwhelms every other consideration, which is another way of defining a condition of de facto autonomy.
